Fonts!

My idea in a nutshell is: customizable fonts for your computer.

What I was thinking was maybe something like 'os.loadFont(<insert 16bit font here>)'

Maybe making fonts could function like the letters in the printer peripheral (If you look at the code, it uses a table of 0s and 1s to make up a colorable letter.) There could be a font in the ROM, which you could copy out and load it, then your computer screen would refresh and you would be using the font.

Possible applications: ComputerCraft for peoples with different character sets (Japanese).
Encrypting with a font
Making pictures..?

So, who supports this idea?!

I support it

Problem: When playing on a server, how does the client get the font data? I don't suppose you're going to send individual pixels?

Xfel, on 01 August 2012 - 03:06 PM said:

Problem: When playing on a server, how does the client get the font data? I don't suppose you're going to send individual pixels?

It wouldn't matter, as long as you have the fonts on/in your mods folder. If this is to be added, it'll have to come with fonts or else it won't work.. UNTIL 1.4 MC (with ModAPI)

I suppose it would just run through the server, and maybe convert it to a font.png to send to the client. It'd be confusing but eh. Dan could do it.

mrminer84403, on 02 August 2012 - 09:12 AM said:

I suppose it would just run through the server, and maybe convert it to a font.png to send to the client. It'd be confusing but eh. Dan could do it.

He should just take the minecraft font images and add them to the server so you could do the fonts in the languages.

What? That makes no sense. A server doesn't need to have any images and they wouldn't help.

Better language support is something we want to look into.

What about texture pack support? That would help. Maybe it could load the font of the currently-in-use texPack.

Cloudy, on 02 August 2012 - 02:29 PM said:

What? That makes no sense. A server doesn't need to have any images and they wouldn't help.

Better language support is something we want to look into.

I didn't mean server.. I meant client-sided language support. Thanks for reply though, I want languages too.
Although, you could do what mrminer said, have the server send to the client what fonts. This would also be useful with peripherals.
I think 1.5 CC should focus more on server content.

Noodle, on 03 August 2012 - 06:09 PM said:

I think 1.5 CC should focus more on server content

and better Client-Server interaction…

I think you people don't see the actual problem. The CC font renderer only supports a limited amount of characters, because it can't use utf8. Lua also can't handle those characters, because they are two bytes long. So, the solution is not to add utf8, nor to create new font.PNG's every Time. You should be able to switch the codepage like in DOS! For example, you have a complete .PNG for The renderer, containing over 256 chars or control Symbols. Changing the codepage would just map the range 1 to 256 onto a range.of equal size inside that PNG. So, 65 would be with codepage 1 an A, but with Codepage 3 the top right corner frame-char. Or with codepage 2, maybe a special umlaut or exotic character.

Problem is, this would require various modifications to the renderer. And as my experience with mc-modders is, they are too lazy to touch such classes more than One initial time.

It would be cool. About the languages.